see whether the note is found," he said to himself. "Of
course, if it is, I will pay it--" That is, he would pay it if he
were obliged to do it.

Poor Barclay was buried in Chicago--it would have been too expensive
to bring on the body--and pretty soon it transpired that he had left
no property, except the modest cottage in which his widow and son
continued to live.

Poor Mrs. Barclay! Everybody pitied her, and lamented her straitened
circumstances. Squire Davenport kept silence, and thought, with
guilty joy, "They haven't found the note; I can keep the money, and no
one will be the wiser!"

How a rich man could have been guilty of such consummate meaness I
will not undertake to explain, but "the love of money is the root of
evil," and Squire Davenport had love of money in no common measure.

Five years passed. Mrs. Barclay was obliged to mortgage her house to
obtain the means of living, and the very man who supplied her with the
money was the very man whom her husband had blindly trusted. She
little dreamed that it was her own money he was doling out to her.

In fact, Squire Davenport himself had almost forgotten it. He had
come to consider the thousand dollars and interest fully and
absolutely his own, and had no apprehension that his mean fraud would
ever be discovered. Like a thunderbolt, then, came to him the
declaration of his unsavory visitor that the note was in existence,
and was in the hands of a man who meant to use it. Smitten with
sudden panic, he stared in the face of the tramp. But he was not
going to give up without a struggle.

"You are evidently trying to impose upon me," he said, mentally
bracing up. "You wish to extort money from me."

"So I do," said the tramp quietly.

"Ha! you admit it?" exclaimed the squire.

"Certainly; I wouldn't have taken the trouble to come here at great
expense and inconvenience if I hadn't been expecting to make some
money."

"Then you have come to the wrong person; I repeat it, you've come to
the wrong person!" said the squire, straightening his back and eying
his companion sternly.

"I begin to think I have," assented the visitor.

"Ha! he weakens!" thought Squire Davenport. "My good man, I
recommend you to turn over a new leaf, and seek to earn an honest
living, instead of trying to levy blackmail on men of means."

"An honest living!" repeated the tramp, with a laugh. "This advice
comes well from you."

Once more the squire felt uncomf